CHAPTER 64: SUFFER

While Ronald’s army was far away, another letter arrived from Willabelle. The letter was written as if sent to a relative, but upon careful reading, it contained highly detailed information.

A subtle poison was hidden in every line. At first glance, innocent sentences like, "My journey is taking long, I hope your health is well" screamed the state of my army when examined closely:

"Thirst has become my travel companion," she had written.

This was telling me that my soldiers’ wells had become useless.

For instance, she described Ronald’s strategy: "Lord Ronald plans to destroy the enemy with a single attack. I believe they will succeed... because the cavalry units are quite strong with their heavy armor."

The continuation of the letter detailed how powerful and heavily armored the army was, which was exactly what I had expected and wanted. I read the letter multiple times. As I walked between the words, it felt as if I could sense the traces of Willabelle’s fingers. Her pen wasn’t just writing; it was carving like a knife.

If Ronald’s scouts had intercepted these lines, they would at most dismiss. It was an ordinary greeting. Yet, between every letter, another world was concealed.

The line "The meals are monotonous but thankfully they fill the stomach" told me that their provisions hadn’t depleted yet, but the variety had diminished. This meant Ronald was marching his army swiftly, paying little attention to logistics. To lighten the burden of his heavily armored cavalry, he had skimped on food.

The sentence "The roads are dusty; if you saw the clouds rising to the sky, your heart would be filled with longing" conveyed something entirely different to me. That dust indicated the cavalry was advancing hastily, without rest. Thus, when they reached the battlefield, fatigue would add to the weight of their armor on their shoulders.

On the surface, it was emotional; in reality, it was a deadly report.

As I folded and sealed the letter, a scene materialized in my mind: Ronald, in all his grandeur, believing he would claim victory with a single strike. But no matter how heavily armored, an army with empty bellies and parched throats is nothing more than a heap of iron.

I noticed myself smiling for a moment. Behind her cold facade, Willabelle had given me the most valuable weapon: knowledge.

Now, the question was how I would use this information.

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Ronald’s thirty-thousand-strong army appeared on the horizon like a flood of steel. The plain they chose to set up camp was actually the center of a trap cunningly prepared by my engineers.

The first sign was thirst. For days, they had encountered poisoned wells and dried-up riverbeds. The soldiers’ lips were cracked, and the animals’ tongues hung out. And finally, they pitched their tents around the only water source they found. Unbeknownst to them, a bitter poison had been stealthily infused into that water for days. It wasn’t lethal, but it would churn their stomachs, sap their strength, and disrupt their sleep.

I chose this poison because it takes effect hours later. If I had chosen a poison that killed the drinker immediately, after the first few people died, the rest would not have consumed the water. Of course, I didn’t have such a powerful poison at my disposal anyway.

As night fell, the groans rising from between the tents silenced Ronald’s army for the first time. Thousands of soldiers writhed in intestinal agony, drinking their own fears instead of water. Meanwhile, my eight thousand men rested silently in the depths of the forest.

War begins by gnawing at the human mind. Ronald’s colossal thirty-thousand-man army had already swallowed the seeds of collapse on the very first day.

In their eyes, thirst, stomach pain, or sleeplessness was just an ordinary affliction. But I knew: when a soldier loses sleep, his shield feels a bit heavier; when his stomach burns, he lifts his sword one breath slower. And these small flaws, when combined across thousands of soldiers, silently drag an army to its grave.

At midnight, I unrolled the map at my headquarters. In the flickering firelight, shadows fell across the map, laying out the enemy tents’ positions before me as if on display. My spymaster’s secret markings told me exactly where Ronald was concentrating his forces.

Their camp was established within nothing but a circle. And at every point on that circle, my traps lay hidden: soil turned into swamp, secretly loosened bridge supports, oil barrels buried at the roots of trees...

My army consisted of eight thousand men, but they were well-fed, well-rested, and men who would carry out my orders without question. I trusted them because they had been handpicked one by one. Ronald’s army, on the other hand, was nothing more than a crowded herd.

That night, we waited in silence. The moonlight illuminated the camp like a pure white blanket. Amid the cries of stomach pains, the occasional grunts of sentries could be heard. Meanwhile, I ran my hands over the map and murmured:

"Come morning, this place will turn into a graveyard."

My plan was clear: first hunger and thirst, then disease and fear , and finally collapse with a single blow. **True flawless victory** is won without swinging a sword.

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As dawn enveloped the plain in a heavy fog, Ronald’s camp was still shrouded in the shadow of illness. His men’s eyes were bloodshot, their stomachs groaning more than rumbling. Muffled grunts, coughs, and curses rose from inside the tents. For them, it was just a bad night. For me, it was the dawn of victory.

The first move wasn’t mine, it was nature’s.

My engineers had been redirecting the small riverbed to the east of the camp for days, and they opened the barriers just before dawn. Only a small channel had been created, but the massive body of water quickly widened that artificial riverbed, advancing inexorably toward the enemy headquarters. It wasn’t a massive flood, perhaps a few meters deep, but its effect would suffice.

A mud-choked torrent invaded Ronald’s tent. When the men rushed out in panic, they hadn’t fully donned their boots or armor. Soaked and weighed down by their clothes, they were half-asleep and semi-sick.

That was the moment I launched the first signal flare.

The red light rising from the forest’s darkness set my eight thousand men into motion.

The assault began with a volley of arrows, targeted only at selected marks: standard-bearers, officers, messenger runners. As the standard-bearers’ heads shattered and their banners fell to the ground, fear pierced deeper into the bowels of the thirty-thousand-strong army. For when a soldier loses his banner, he loses his direction too.

My men weren’t attacking from just one side of the circle; we struck from two points. This left Ronald’s army unable to pinpoint the enemy’s location, afraid to advance into the darkness.

In their eyes, we numbered in the tens of thousands, yet we were still eight thousand. Managing perception is a sharper weapon than swinging a sword.

Once the initial wave of shock passed, Ronald’s soldiers tried to regroup. Under their commanders’ shouts, some ranks formed, shields were raised. But beneath the water-logged armor, they were left breathless. Still, they outnumbered us four to one. I knew that at some point, that massive bulk would surge toward us. It was for that moment that I had prepared the forest**.

One of my men awaited my signal: the spark to ignite the oil barrels hidden in the dense forest line to the west. But we hadn’t set this inside the camp; rather, along their advance paths.

And as expected, it happened.

Ronald’s vanguard lunged in the direction of the red light. They aimed to overwhelm us with numbers. But I had foreseen this greed. When thousands of heavily armored soldiers extricated themselves from the mud and charged into the forest, I gave the signal.

In an instant, smoke billowed skyward. Flames erupted from the forest’s edge, trees roaring as they burned.

The enemy soldiers weren’t in the midst of the fire, but the wall of flames rising before them halted them. They couldn’t retreat, for behind them was waterlogged mud. They couldn’t advance, for the flames blocked their path like a crimson hell.

At that moment, my soldiers’ war cry filled the sky. We knew the fire’s perimeter; secret passages and narrow trails were entrusted only to our footprints. In their own eyes, the enemy was thirty thousand strong, but by confining them to a narrow space, I turned them into thousands of wretched ghosts.

Our archers exploited the fire’s light. Shadows exposed the enemy ranks; arrows embedded in armor gleaming before the flames, spears slipping through shields and drowning out screams.

The crackle of the fire, the roar of the flames, and the cacophony of cries filled the night. Ronald’s thirty-thousand-strong army suddenly resembled scattered bands of twenty or thirty men.

What made them formidable was their crowd; I had turned that crowd against them. Instead of fighting shoulder to shoulder, each soldier was sinking into the mud alongside his comrades.

For me, this wasn’t just a battle; it was a calculation problem.

"The way to win the war = discipline + food + morale"

Remove one of these three, and the crowd turns into a giant pile of corpses. I had removed all three at once.

My small units infiltrating the passages beside the forest picked their targets. A group heading toward the command tent silenced Ronald’s messengers one by one. Without messengers, there were no orders; without orders, thirty thousand men were nothing but a vast blind herd.

I heard some guy voice at one point. Amid the mud and flames, a muffled but still powerful shout:

"Tighten the ranks! Forward!"

But this voice echoed in enemy soldiers’ ears not as hope, but as the echo of despair. One of my men rushed to my side.

"My Lord, if you wish, we can launch a direct assault now. The enemy is in disarray."

I shook my head.

"No. Not yet. Let them suffer."

Patience is the sharpest sword of armies. Even if Ronald’s thirty-thousand-strong army drew their blades from their sheaths, I had already sheathed their spirits.

In the advancing hours of the night, the fire retreated into the forest depths. The path was now blocked, and the soldiers were still floundering in the mud. We continued to strike from the shadows: arrows, spears, brief raids... Each attack fell like a stone into a vast lake, creating ripples. And these ripples shattered the invisible sea called morale.

In the crimson of dawn, the scene was now clear: Ronald’s army was still numerically superior, but spiritually exhausted. My men’s eyes were still alive, their steps resolute. Because we weren’t fighting, we were merely awaiting the result of a mathematical operation.

For me, the only question left was: How should I kill that bastard Ronald?

I suppose the best option would be to burn him at the stake in the very city he tyrannized.